[HN Gopher] Why Open Source?
___________________________________________________________________
Why Open Source?
Author : subomi
Score : 81 points
Date : 2023-08-21 19:41 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (getconvoy.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (getconvoy.io)
| andy99 wrote:
| I looked into this recently in relation to AI models, and had the
| following list for reasons companies (and ICs to some extent)
| open source. It's my own post but I think it's on topic here:
| http://marble.onl/posts/motivations_for_open_source.html
|
| Name recognition
|
| Community contribution
|
| Collaboration
|
| Building a user base
|
| Creating a standard
| Aleklart wrote:
| Because Free Software gives to much freedom to users.
| MrNeRF wrote:
| Open source software deserves celebration. Its impact on the
| world is profound and transformative. Recently, I began porting
| the 3D Gaussian splatting paper to C++ and CUDA with an aim to
| optimize the training speed of such models. This endeavor was
| only possible because the original authors open-sourced their
| work. The feedback has been encouraging, and I feel that I'm
| making a difference--perhaps even more than in my regular job.
| That said, it's essential to remember that contributing to open
| source, while rewarding, can be demanding if it's not your full-
| time occupation. Yet, through such efforts, we ensure these tools
| remain freely accessible and aren't monopolized by corporations.
| I provide you the link to this GitHub project in case you are
| interested. https://github.com/MrNeRF/gaussian-splatting-cuda
| bibryam wrote:
| I described a checklist for open source vs fake open source
| evaluation
|
| https://blog.oss.fund/p/a-framework-for-open-source-evaluati...
| [deleted]
| ushakov wrote:
| Elephant in the room: People looking for open-source solutions
| are not looking to spend money, it's usually the opposite. If you
| want to build a business around open-source you should keep in
| mind, that your users are _not_ your customers. What individual
| software developers want is different what enterprises want to
| pay for. Focus on the latter
| simonw wrote:
| "People looking for open-source solutions are not looking to
| spend money, it's usually the opposite."
|
| I don't think that's true. In previous positions where I've had
| significant influence on budget spend I've still favored open
| source solutions because they make more sense from a risk point
| of view: should the vendor fail, the product has a solid chance
| of continuing to be useful.
| ushakov wrote:
| It depends. I'd rather go with a venture-baked open-source
| solution rather than something made by one person in his free
| time
| nazgulsenpai wrote:
| I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here except
| some people/companies have different priorities -- and if
| that's the case then there's room for both VC backed
| startups and smaller open-source projects.
| danenania wrote:
| It's the freemium model, which has always required a sufficient
| conversion rate from free to paid to work.
|
| That doesn't mean you should ignore what your free/OSS users
| want though. Today's hobbyist OSS user may be hired at a big
| company tomorrow and introduce everyone there to your product.
| ushakov wrote:
| Last week, I talked to a VC, who's invested in a pretty
| popular open-source startup. They have _huge_ issues
| converting oss users > paying businesses
| danenania wrote:
| Sure, it's a common problem with freemium. When freemium
| products fail, it's often for that reason. But there are
| also countless examples of freemium/open-core products
| succeeding.
| ezekg wrote:
| That sounds like a business/value problem not necessarily
| an open source problem. People won't pay for something if
| the free /OSS version meets all of their needs. That's why
| an "open-core" business model works so well. Open core also
| allows you specifically target businesses with specific
| features.
| spjain wrote:
| Feel the same way with integralapi.co - we'll be going open
| source very soon but want to make sure we have everything "open
| source ready".
|
| Can't give out code that can't be exposed to the public.
| ushakov wrote:
| Love the website design, but don't quite understand what it is
| and what problem you're trying to solve?
| simonw wrote:
| I'm building https://www.datasette.cloud/ and
| https://datasette.io/ almost entirely open source for a number of
| commercial reasons.
|
| 1. I want organizations (initially newsrooms that care about data
| journalism, but rapidly growing beyond that) to be able to trust
| the product. The default result of 95% of startups is to go out
| of business, and going all-in on a product that then blinks out
| of existence is bad! When I'm selecting a vendor this is a thing
| I always consider, so I'd like my customers to feel confident
| that they have the ultimate escape hatch - run it yourself -
| should they ever need it.
|
| 2. Newsrooms in particular have learned this lesson before, many
| times over - and not just for startups. Remember Google Fusion
| Tables? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Fusion_Tables That's
| just one relatively recent example.
|
| 3. Datasette is an ecosystem play. There are over 100 plugins
| already - https://datasette.io/plugins - and I hope for there to
| be thousands more. Developers don't invest nearly as heavily in
| building and releasing plugins for closed-source platforms.
|
| 4. Open source is a way for me to punch _way_ above my weight. I
| can have a much larger impact on the world by participating in
| open source, compared to if everything I'd been building had been
| closed.
| MPlus88 wrote:
| How are you going to monetize it? Your site has no mention of
| pricing.
| simonw wrote:
| I'm going to charge organizations a monthly fee for using the
| hosted SaaS service.
|
| Implementing billing and setting pricing is next on my TODO
| list!
| debarshri wrote:
| I agree with your perspective but let me try to formulate an
| argument against that.
|
| 1. Trust over a product or platform can be formed in many ways.
| Opensource is an irreversible way of doing that. I have often
| seen people equate opensource to free usage of the product, it
| is great for adoption but very bad when it comes to
| monetization. Even if your project is available as OSS if you
| don't have community around it, disappearance of the org is
| still a threat.
|
| 2. If there is no market, you don't any incentive to maintain
| it forever. Google fusion tables is probably that case. The
| market perhaps was not large enough.
|
| 3. I do buy into incentive to opensource for building an eco-
| system
|
| 4. I do buy into the larger impact argument but question is -
| will you keep maintaining it if there is no incentive for you
| in the process?
|
| I have seen lately, lot of VC backed orgs posting OSS as a
| differentiating factor than their competitors. I am not sure if
| I would buy into that argument.
| simonw wrote:
| > will you keep maintaining it if there is no incentive for
| you in the process?
|
| Speaking personally, Datasette is the first project I've
| worked on in my entire career where I'm confident that I
| would be delighted if I was still working on it in 10-15
| years time.
|
| The space it operates in - analyzing, exploring and
| publishing data about the world we live in - has completely
| limitless appeal to me. Every project I've ever cared about
| can be attached to it, especially given the plugin
| architecture which supports me trying out all kinds of weird
| and interesting applications for the core technology.
|
| If I can't make it work financially it can go back to being a
| side-project for me. I'm confident the financial side of it
| can work though.
| ignoramous wrote:
| > _Speaking personally, Datasette is the first project I
| 've worked on in my entire career where I'm confident that
| I would be delighted if I was still working on it in 10-15
| years time._
|
| That's a _bus factor_ of 1?
|
| You know what's more cool though? A 100 years:
| https://archive.is/qnWWX (didn't work out all that well for
| Evernote, regardless). I'm sorry but this script has been
| sequel'd over again and again. May be, just may be, you're
| a unicorn (:
| kapilvt wrote:
| > Speaking personally, Datasette is the first project I've
| worked on in my entire career where I'm confident that I
| would be delighted if I was still working on it in 10-15
| years time.
|
| I feel the same way about cloud custodian and starting
| stacklet, but I also put stuff into a foundation, so that
| it has proper survivability beyond the org, irrespective of
| the org's decisions (Ala hashicorp), and true survivability
| and impact on an oss project means getting past individual
| contributor bus factor.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| I made an open source license that you may be interested in.
| It's basically the AGPL + copyleft for _services_ that are
| dependent on your service, as well as build tools. You can
| check it out here: https://github.com/candiddev/cpl.
| benatkin wrote:
| That's kind of like saying "I have a fork of bash that you
| may be interested in". It fails the familiarity test, and
| that's really important.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| Does that really matter in the context of a license though?
| The terms are the terms, if folks don't agree with the
| terms they can negotiate different ones or not use it.
| benatkin wrote:
| There isn't a lot of people thinking, gee, I want an
| unfamiliar license, so you're going out on a limb by
| showing someone a new one. Just like if you made a fork
| of bash with some new feature and were like, "here, use
| this".
| abatilo wrote:
| I used to open source every single thing I built. But recently, I
| stopped doing that because now I build everything as a single
| monorepo. All of my completely disconnected side project ideas
| are all in one repo and I'm much more happy being able to keep
| this like dependencies up to date in one place instead of having
| a different repo per project.
|
| I would like to go back to open sourcing all things I play with
| but maybe I need to find a repo structure and tooling that would
| make that more sustainable.
| gardenhedge wrote:
| Open source allows other Open companies to train their models.
| tzhenghao wrote:
| Open source also serves as a "defense strategy" for larger
| companies whose core business does not directly / indirectly
| depend on commercializing its open source project(s). They in
| turn serve more like hedges.
|
| For example, Meta with PyTorch in context of the machine learning
| tooling space. PyTorch is probably strategically important for
| them as they do not have a cloud business. The other large
| competing deep learning framework is Tensorflow, designed and
| open sourced by Google but also owns a cloud business (GCP). They
| also have in-house AI accelerators like TPUs. Microsoft didn't
| really have a deep learning framework, but they have ONNX, and is
| now using ONNXRuntime as an on-ramp to their cloud business
| (Azure).
|
| If Meta wants to continue doing ML, and all the other cloud
| players jacked up their prices, that's gonna hurt Meta's
| operating costs. So it's still "cheap" to have hedged against
| such a scenario. All these on top of upsides like developer
| marketing etc.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| This strategy is called Commoditizing Your Complement [0].
|
| [0] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-
| letter-v/
| mousetree wrote:
| > If Meta wants to continue doing ML, and all the other cloud
| players jacked up their prices, that's gonna hurt Meta's
| operating costs
|
| How so? Meta is not running AWS/GCP/Azure.
| tzhenghao wrote:
| They're not, but there's non-zero probability most R&D below
| a deep learning framework gets fully vertically integrated
| (or even aggregated in the short term) to just the big cloud
| players.
| bootsmann wrote:
| Open sourcing Pytorch was also a human resources decision. Big
| tech learned this lesson somewhere around 2014, that whatever
| problems they solve, other companies will have 5 years down the
| line and if they don't open source their solutions someone else
| will release the industry defining standard and meta & co will
| have trouble hiring people for their handrolled solution 15
| years down the line. IIrc some spotify engineer said in an
| interview once that this was a big reason behind them open-
| sourcing backstage.
| BirAdam wrote:
| Honestly? I personally care very little whether or not something
| is open source at this point in time. Code bases have become so
| large that there's little benefit to me other than self-hosting,
| and there are few things I care to self-host. The main argument I
| would make is that companies should, at the very least, open
| source everything before shuttering. If you're going out of
| business, allow your former customers to maintain themselves what
| you're no longer going to maintain yourself.
| willio58 wrote:
| I never self host out of pure laziness. I like open source
| because I know (at least theoretically) that I can go in and
| fix something with a PR in a codebase I don't "own".
|
| I've fixed like 2 things in projects I've used ever, I kinda
| suck as a contributor. But the indirect benefits I get from
| others being able to contribute to these projects is immense.
| paulddraper wrote:
| Fix, or just understand.
|
| There is "documentation" and there is documentation.
|
| And the real documentation is always the code.
| smarx007 wrote:
| While on the topic, I think EUPL should become the default
| license for open-source projects in the business context. It's a
| weak copyleft license (OSI and FSF approved), so it does not
| strike mortal fear of "viral" license spread on business
| partners. Similar to EPL, MPL, and LGPL, it creates an obligation
| of sharing back the changes made to weak-copyleft licensed
| portion of the code. Finally, EUPL closes the SaaS loophole,
| which is similar to a non-existent Affero LGPL license.
| arp242 wrote:
| The EUPL has a lot of things going for it: it's readable by
| mortals (unlike GPL), has official translations, and in general
| is just "GPL, but better". That said, it doesn't quite close
| the "SaaS loophole". Or rather, it's somewhat easily
| circumvented as the EUPL allows combining your code with other
| copyleft "compatible licenses" and then redistributing _all_ of
| this combined work under the "compatible license". These
| compatible licenses include the GPL and LGPL.
|
| For my project I removed these licenses from the list of
| "compatible license", so technically it's not "EUPL 1.2",
| although it's close enough... I brought this up with one of the
| authors of the EUPL a few years back, and they felt it was fine
| as-is, but I still wish it would allow things to be a bit more
| flexible in this regard.
|
| Still, I think EUPL is an excellent replacement for the GPL.
| But AGPL is a bit more complex. I still prefer my "EUPL 1.2
| Martin flavour" because IMHO the AGPL is a horrendously written
| license and the text is just atrocious even by legalize
| standards.
|
| It sees very little usage unfortunately; last time I checked my
| project was the _only_ one in all of the Void repo to use EUPL
| :- /
| rapnie wrote:
| It is interesting that the EU institutions started using
| #EUVoice (Mastodon) [0] and #EUVideo (Peertube) [1] on the
| Fediverse, both AGPL-licensed.
|
| [0] https://social.network.europa.eu
|
| [1] https://tube.network.europa.eu
| endisneigh wrote:
| Though as an end user I love open source - I love it because it's
| free, but you're not going to necessarily build a business off
| people who like free stuff unless it involves monetizing them
| another way (ads, getting them to give you labor for free, etc).
|
| Open source aside I wish there were some improvements on doing a
| highly available self hosted setup. I'm talking plugging 5
| machines into a router and power and it just works. Auto healing,
| redundant backups, etc.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| I find "open core" or source-available (with license allowing
| self-hosting and custom modifications) to be a good middle
| ground.
|
| It allows potential users to quickly try out the solution and
| prove its worth without having to first go through a (often
| months-long in big companies) procurement process.
|
| It also allows users to understand how the system works
| internally which can fill gaps in documentation or cover use-
| cases the original developer hasn't thought of.
|
| It can also allow them to fix bugs/edge-cases (that may not be
| in upstream as they are specific to a niche use-case) or to
| tweak the software to better fit their infrastructure.
|
| Finally being self-hostable automatically makes the software
| suitable for secure, potentially air-gapped environments or
| allows the software to be deployed closer to where the rest of
| the infrastructure is.
| tracker1 wrote:
| Disagree on source-available... if the upstream business
| dies, source available doesn't necessarily allow you to make
| adjustments or fix bugs should that upstream company go
| under, or just stop supporting the
| application/library/service you depend on.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| You at least have the technical possibility to do so - not
| the case with closed-source or even cloud-based systems. It
| _may_ be a breach of the license, and it will be up to you
| to weigh the cost of potential litigation against the cost
| of stopping using the software immediately.
|
| Also note that fixing bugs/making adjustments doesn't mean
| _releasing_ them - the latter may be a problem with some
| companies, but it 's unlikely anyone would care (nor know
| about) if you do the former internally.
| ezekg wrote:
| What "source-available" license doesn't allow you to do
| that via a fork? I'd love to know.
|
| ELv2 allows it. BUSL allows it. SSPL allows it. Apache
| Commons allows it.
|
| People diss these licenses and they don't even understand
| them.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| To be fair, "source available" could also mean a fully
| custom license, closer to a typical proprietary closed-
| source license, except with "btw here's some source code,
| but you're not really allowed to do anything with it".
|
| Even in the above scenario, source-available is still
| better because you at least have the _technical_
| possibility of doing something with it, at the cost of
| potential litigation for breach of license.
| ezekg wrote:
| Yes, in theory. But in practice, I haven't seen a popular
| "source-available" license that limits your ability to
| fork. So making a blanket statement like that is wrong in
| practice, but people still tout it. That's the problem
| with the term "source-available" and why a lot of
| companies using these licenses avoid the term altogether.
| Pannoniae wrote:
| But if you say "open source" instead of "source
| available" then you get the OSI folks flaming you for not
| comforming to the definition. It's a lose-lose situation.
| tracker1 wrote:
| My biggest familiarity with "source available" was some
| of the .Net stuff from MS before they fully embraced
| FLOSS for .Net language/platform development. Which was
| iirc, a look, but don't touch kind of thing.
|
| If you can fork and reuse, then "source-available" is
| probably a poor term for said license.
| ezekg wrote:
| > If you can fork and reuse, then "source-available" is
| probably a poor term for said license.
|
| I agree. Yet projects using said licenses get shamed into
| adopting the term "source-available" even though it
| doesn't fit, while "open-source" actually makes more
| sense in terms of communicating freedoms. It's all so
| ridiculous. Things need to change.
| mawise wrote:
| > I wish there were some improvements on doing a highly
| available self hosted setup. I'm talking plugging 5 machines
| into a router and power and it just works. Auto healing,
| redundant backups, etc.
|
| I do too! I'm building an open-source system designed for end
| user self-hosting and one of my goals has been making it as
| easy as possible to self-host. The two biggest are DNS
| management and Router port forwarding. I can give you a script
| that turns a Raspberry Pi into a fully-functional server, but
| you still need to configure your domain to point to your house,
| and configure your router to point to the Pi.
|
| These require two different solutions. The first would be
| something like Oauth2 for DNS. I've spoken with the guy running
| TakingNames who trying to do that, DomainConnect[2] is another
| approach, but the requirement for service preregistration kills
| it for consumer self-hosting.
|
| For port forwarding, I think we need a self-hoster's router.
| Something with (at a minimum) a better UI for doing SSL
| termination and reverse proxy without asking you to understand
| and nginx config file. Bonus points if a self-hosted service
| can discover the router and use an Oauth-type flow to do it's
| own configuration.
|
| Once these exist it becomes much more feasible to have a
| service which does auto fail-over, or redundant backups, etc..
| in your basement/living room without additional configuration.
|
| [1]: https://takingnames.io/ [2]:
| https://www.domainconnect.org/
| nologic01 wrote:
| It is quite intriguing that after _four decades_ [1] it is not
| particularly clear why individuals and organizations adopt "open
| source" (in one of its many forms). Yet somehow it keeps growing
| as tangible reality and is now possibly irreversible.
|
| There have been countless arguments for motivations, benefits
| (short and long term), sustainable business models etc., with
| various degrees of plausibility but in general rather vague,
| anecdotal and subjective.
|
| What is missing is not reflection on the phenomenon by its
| practitioners (or others in the tech domain) but the sharp,
| objective and comprehensive eye of scholars with legal and
| economic expertise (and by now, also a knack for tech history).
|
| Understanding the dynamics of "open source" (in quotes again,
| because of its wide and evolving range of manifestations) is
| quite important. E.g., there are many domains that seem
| completely allergic to it, for reasons that are as unclear as the
| reasons for success in other areas.
|
| In any case, while techies are taking it for granted, it is one
| of the most remarkable social phenomena of recent times. There
| aren't that many examples of large scale cooperation /
| coopetition of complete strangers across the planet, working on
| very concrete and useful tools.
|
| [1] lets take the GNU project as the nominal start of the open
| source era https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Project
| zabzonk wrote:
| > 92% of SaaS companies fail
|
| then for gods sake stop creating them!
|
| also what has this to do with foss?
| ezekg wrote:
| I really love the sudden surge of open sources businesses coming
| out of YC and in general. I share some of the same sentiments in
| the post, having open sourced my SaaS business of 7 years earlier
| this year. One of my main driving forces was market pressure from
| enterprises wanting to self-host. One of the other drivers was my
| bus-factor of 1, as was longevity as you mentioned. Time will
| tell if the distribution side of things will ring true for my
| business, but I'm hoping it will judging by initial growth i.r.t.
| CE.
|
| I wrote more about my "whys" here [0] if anybody is interested in
| a similar post.
|
| [0]: https://keygen.sh/blog/all-your-licensing-are-belong-to-you/
| subomi wrote:
| OP here.
|
| Hey, I read your post and I'm a big fan of keygen. I plan on
| self-hosting it too for Convoy soon. :)
| ezekg wrote:
| That's *really* awesome to hear. Thanks for sharing. :)
|
| Let me know if you ever need anything!
| subomi wrote:
| Sure thing. Well done!!
| jehb wrote:
| It's an interesting question, but it's the opposite of the one I
| usually ask.
|
| Software should be open source. "Why try to monetize?" would be
| the question I'd ask myself.
| gandhirs wrote:
| Why male modela?
| new_user_final wrote:
| how do you integrate convoy with twilio? it seems twilio webhook
| needs custom response based on event e.g record call.
| subomi wrote:
| You can configure a custom response on every source configured
| on Convoy.
| returningfory2 wrote:
| In light of Terraform/HashiCorp's license change recently, how
| "open source" should we consider companies like this?
|
| Currently their GitHub repo is licensed under an open-source
| Mozilla license [1]. But contributors also have to sign a CLA [2]
| which perhaps (?) allows the company to re-license the work like
| HashiCorp did? Should we now consider companies like this to be
| "open source for the moment"?
|
| [1] https://github.com/frain-dev/convoy [2] https://cla-
| assistant.io/frain-dev/convoy?pullRequest=1362
| whobre wrote:
| Deja vu from the late 1990s
| paulgb wrote:
| Well said, Subomi. I'd like to see more open source companies be
| public about how they think about open source as a strategic
| decision (admittedly, I could do better about this myself).
|
| I think Vercel / Next.js and Automattic / Wordpress are great
| examples of aligning value to the business while also creating
| (and not capturing) a bunch of value to users of the open source
| project. As a result of leaving some value on the table for
| users, both projects have a thriving plugin/extension community
| that wouldn't exist if they were closed-source or confined to a
| single vendor. Likewise, I'm more likely to start a Next.js
| project knowing that I can host it anywhere, even though my
| default is to use Vercel.
| subomi wrote:
| Paul, please write the article. I *want* to read it.
|
| Hard agree. It's why I also believe that more & more companies
| will be more strategic with their licensing choice from the
| beginning. The common wisdom is to give it all away and grow at
| all costs, then switch licenses when there's brand value and
| the business needs revenue. This is poor because the license
| changes aren't bad in themselves because they still enable the
| individual developer to take enormous benefits, but they come
| with significant disadvantages like community drama, bad pr
| etc.
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(page generated 2023-08-21 23:01 UTC)